From the Greenbelt to our schools: Paul Calandra is selling us out

Ontario’s Education Minister, Paul Calandra, is on a dangerous path. While ordinary people in this province are struggling to put food on the table, find housing, or pay for basic medications, Calandra is focused on grabbing more power—at the expense of democracy, public education, and community voices.

This is the man brought in by Doug Ford to clean up the mess left by former Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister, Steve Clark over the Greenbelt scandal. Calandra cleaned house in the Minister’s office. Now, from Queen’s Park, he’s targeting entire school boards with that same controlling energy.

Through his new Bill 33, Supporting Children and Students Act Calandra is giving the Minister’s office sweeping new powers: the ability to overrule elected school trustees, take control of local school boards, and decide what gets taught—or erased—in Ontario classrooms. School boards will even have to apply to the Ministry if it wants to change a school’s name; it gives micromanaging a whole new meaning. But the change is there to tell Ontario school board trustees that they are no longer in charge of the schools they’ve been elected to represent.

Calandra is also mandating the return of police in schools—even where communities and school boards have already voted to remove them. For many families, especially Black and Indigenous families, this is a terrifying rollback of hard-won progress. It’s not about safety. It’s about control.

Let’s be clear: these attacks aren’t about improving education. They’re part of a broader agenda that’s playing out across North America—where anti-trans, anti-immigrant, and anti-Palestinian sentiment is being weaponized to distract from deeper problems: chronic underfunding, corporate giveaways, and a widening wealth gap.

While Calandra and his colleagues hike their own salaries and cut taxes for the wealthy, they want you to be angry at a teacher for using a child’s chosen pronouns. They want you to fight your neighbour over what books are in your kid’s library. All while they siphon off the resources your community desperately needs.

This is about more than schools. It’s about democracy. It’s about whether billionaires and backroom politicians get to decide the future of our children, our public lands, and our right to be heard.

We need to call this what it is: a power grab. A distraction. A betrayal.

Ontario families deserve safe, inclusive, well-funded public schools. We deserve local decision-making. And we deserve leaders who care more about kids than about than power. Let’s fight for that future—together.

 

 

Nigel Barriffe

Dad

School Teacher 

Singer Songwriter 

P.S. Call to Action 

We’re organizing. Teachers, parents, students, and communities are coming together to say: enough.

Join the Fund Our Schools campaign to demand real investments in public education—not privatization, not political bullying, and not backroom land deals.

Visit fundourschools.ca to take action, contact your MPP, and show up at upcoming rallies.

Our kids deserve better. Our communities deserve better. And we’re not backing down.